Precipice
by Amber Penglass
Summary: When rules, lines, restrictions are torn away, it can be easy to be swept up in unfamiliar emotions, as the Exile discovers during one slip into anger and the dark side. Atton is there to clear up the confusion. 10th in the Atton/Exile Snippit Series.


Precipice

Amber Penglass

An Atton/FemExile Snippit

________________

It frightened her, how easy it had been. How simple, to plant that suggestion in so weak and malleable a mind. It terrified her, how she had stood there, let it happen, even smiled a bit to see the thug fall...

Aelyn shivered, and suppressed the urge to wrap her arms around herself, instead clenching them into white-knuckled fists at her side.

"Go," she said to the man the thugs had been harassing.

"Please, you gotta help me-"

"I already did, now go before more follow." Her voice was terse, and she saw her unmasked companion look at her oddly. If Mandalore was examining her, as well, she couldn't see the fact behind his impassive helmet.

The man hesitated, looking between her and Atton, before finally taking note of the icy glaze over the eyes of his rescuer. Then, with a barely suppressed squeak, he scuttled away into the shadows.

Silence, for a mere moment. Then, "Aelyn...what was that?"

"Lets go," she responded, shoving aside the flash of shame and filth- and beneath it, the immense satisfaction. She ignored Atton. Mandalore she didn't ignore, she simply never spoke to unless he spoke to her first, or circumstance called for direct conversation. Neither of those things were apparent now, and for once she was grateful for the silent monolith of a man's stoic ways. She didn't feel like discussing it...

Atton did.

"Hey, wait up a minute..." Atton caught her arm, closing over cloth and elbow. She shook off his grip, still not looking at him.

"Not now," she hissed. She swallowed harshly, bile stinging her throat. Force, she was going to be sick... Surprisingly, Atton obliged, and backed off. She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and continued on. She shoved thoughts, feelings, contemplations into the back of her mind in a neat bundle, just as she'd done her whole adult life with everything and anything that evoked strong emotions. But this bundle leaked, and throughout the rest of the day she'd see flashes of that tusked-face, blank, serene, even as he took that step-

And then she'd shake it off, focus on the task at hand, and ignore the calculating look on Atton's face whenever he caught her going pale, and they'd continue on with their mission.

For now, it was good enough.

_________

"We must purge our beloved city of the filth, the rabble, the disease that plagues it! What has the republic ever done for us that did not come with a pricetag of blood and sweat?"

The man was drawing quite a crowd. She was already annoyed with city guards abusing power, and a lack of common decency to a woman and her children. Aelyn was not overly fond of the city of Iziz at this particular moment, and the man, 'Ponlar' he was named by an observer, was not helping.

She stood near the back, inching closer with her companions, listening to him pour poison into any ear that would listen. His words were based mostly in unreliable prejudice, and very few factual or informative words left his lips. Nonetheless, people were listening. Her fingers itched. This man represented all that was wrong with the universe. Ignorance, intolerance, impatience, unfounded hate, greed, unwilling to listen, the longer the man spoke, the more reasons she added to her list of why she distinctly disliked him. Beside her, she could feel Atton tensing. He, too, had a distaste for closed minded idiocy.

It occurred to her, abruptly, that she could solve this. So simple, so easy-

"_You pay all now," the lizard like being hissed through its rounded maw. Razor teeth showed between thin, scaled lips, and a forked tongue darted out with varying frequency. Its companion poked the man he was speaking to, a bent over shadow of a man who was wringing his hands as if he could milk his own flesh for the cash they sought._

"_I told you I don't have it. Please, just give me some more time-"_

"_No time. You don't have credits? We take something else, instead." The pig-like hulk of a creature snorted and sniffled the words, his smile a blubbering mess of tusks and fat lips. The grin was not a kind one. _

_Aelyn frowned, moving closer to intervene. She heard Atton sigh behind her, and suppressed a tolerant grin. What did he expect her to do? Simply walk on by? Ex-Jedi or no, there was a part of her that would never be able to tolerate undeserved cruelty._

_As soon as Aelyn stepped into view, the man spotted her- his eyes had been darting everywhere, even as he backed away from the pig-man's club-like fists. "There!" He cried. "She's the one, the one who was bringing the rest of my money, she has your credits!"_

_Aelyn paused, blinking with surprise. Well, this was an interesting turn of events. The lizard man looked to her, while the pig man simply snorted and changed his trajectory._

"_Well, come on then," he said, mucus dripping from his snout to catch on a tusk. "Lets have it." He hitched his loose, filthy trousers and stepped closer, while the lizard-man continued to stare at her with narrow eyes._

"_Is this true?" He hissed. "You have this man's money?"_

_She paused, pressing her tongue to the inside of her cheek as she contemplated the approaching two-legged-boar. Behind her, she heard the decidedly soft click of Mandalore loosening a weapon or two. Or three. Subtly, Atton shifted his stance. She stayed as she was, hand resting casually on her belt, near her lightsabre, hidden beneath the folds of her robe._

"_Sure, I know the man," she said, as a cold anger settled unexpectedly into her bones. She was going to help the man. Not that he'd known that, true. But he should have asked for help. While it was possible he'd gotten involved with these men on purely innocent means, she doubted it. To involve someone else in a potentially deadly encounter in a desperate ploy to save your own sorry skin was...well, infuriatingly cowardly. _

_Her grip on her belt tightened._

_Was Kreia right? Was her mission to help people in vain?_

_She grit her teeth._

_Was it all pointless? The endless struggle to try to instill even the tiniest amount of decency in her fellow races? To show a passing kindness, even to those who didn't deserve it?_

_Abruptly, she'd had enough._

_She loosened her deathgrip on her belt, casually raising her hand as if to brush a lock of hair from her face, locking gazes with the bubbling, snorting tusked thug._

"_Yes, I know him. And you really ought to leave him alone."_

"_I really ought to leave him alone." The proper syntax sounded odd coming from the creature's flapping, fat tongue. He blinked, suddenly, shaking off her control, and leering at her._

"_Hey! You made my head feel funny." He stepped closer, plainly attempting to loom. "I think I'm gonna have fun with you..." This time, when he pulled at his trousers, it wasn't simply to fix their positioning._

_Rage flared, hot and cold at once, and so utterly alien a sensation she had no idea what to do with it._

_So she acted._

"_I think you need some air to cool you off," she said, deadly soft. She didn't see Atton blink and look at her with something akin to wariness. The lizard-man was simply watching it all. The man, the former victim, was frozen._

"_I think I need some air."_

"_There's plenty of it, over there," she said, waving her hand to the big, open chasm that penetrated all several dozen layers of cramped business levels. Suspended, somewhere down below, was a reactor core that powered the whole area._

"_Plenty of air," he mumbled, turning to where she'd motioned._

_Like fingers in dough, she probed his mind, planting one last coercian where it would be most effective-_

_And he jumped._

_The lizard-man turned and fled, suddenly not so amused. The cowering human looked to her with something akin to greed. Atton..._

_Atton looked, for lack of a better term, afraid. _

_As for Aelyn herself, she blinked, lowering the hand she didn't remember raising. When she realized that her victim hadn't even screamed, something inside her began laughing. _

_It didn't stop until they were back on the ship, leaving Nar Shadaa behind._

It had been so easy then, it would be even easier, now.

The man was speaking to her, she realized with a belated jolt of reality.

"Who, me?" She asked, words stilted as she dragged in deep breaths of air. Had she truly come so close to doing it again?

Ponlar prattled at her, and she gave some noncommental answer before turning and fleeing into the crowd. Mandalore cursed, unable to follow as encumbered as he was in his suit and pressing bodies. Atton had no such restrictions, and followed her through the pressing of bodies as deftly as if he were walking in open space.

"Aelyn!" He called, clearly confused.

Fear clutched at her heart. Uncertainty plagued her thoughts. What was this? What was she becoming? When she'd begun to let go of some of those Jedi restrictions, she thought she was freeing herself to better do the job that needed doing. But now...

She stumbled, cursed her own inattentiveness, and looked around herself. A dingy quarter flooded with trash and refuge, with nothing but the hum of salvaging droids and the faint sounds of abrasive music from a guarded cantina entrance filling her ears.

"Hey, exile!" She spun, eyes wide at the name being called. Atton was just rounding the last half-crumbled corner she'd darted around, scowling.

"Well, you weren't answering to your actual name, so I thought I'd try something different," he said defensively, responding to her accusatory glare.

"Go back to Mandalore," she bit out.

"No," he said simply. "Whatever this is, it's been eating at you since Nar Shadaa. I thought you handled it, in whatever way you handle your issues, but apparently not." She had turned away from him, but now he slipped around to block her path, seeking her eyes as she carefully avoided his.

"Rand..."

"No, you listen. I don't know what that was, what made you run off. I don't much care to know, it's none of my business. But I do know what demons look like, and the havok they can wreck when they go unconfined. Maybe you thought you had that particular demon taken care of, I don't know. but you need to deal with it."

"I don't know how!" She snapped, shoving at his shoulder and barreling on past him-

Again, like on Nar Shadaa, he grabbed her arm, this time holding on tight. And she suddenly didn't have the will to resist. All of it, the strain, the uncertainty, the way absolutely everything in her life had turned topsy turvy, it all came crashing down. Without the ingrained Jedi training, she might have broken down. She might have cried. As it was, the best she could do was simply deflate. He searched her face, and made a frustrated sound.

"Come on," he said, pulling her into a darkened alley. A few flesh-and-blood scavengers, among the droids, were looking at them oddly. She leaned against the sandstone wall, looking dejected, eyes virtually empty.

"I'm doing it wrong," she mumbled, burying her face in her hands.

"Doing what wrong?" He asked, trying to be patient, although patience wasn't exactly his strong suit. For her, though, he could try.

For her, he'd try just about damn near anything.

"Being." She said simply. He blinked at her.

"Last I checked, 'being' isn't something you do, it's something you are. Kinda not in the 'right or wrong' category," he told her. She looked up at him, with those dead eyes. No, not dead- repressed.

Silence reigned between them.

Then, "I liked it."

He blinked at her. "Huh?"

"The gorduk. That pig-looking guy, on Nar Shadaa..." she swallowed, and there was a flicker of something in the suppressed sea of her green eyes. "He made me...mad. So very mad. I...I don't get angry, Atton. I can't. But...I did..." She fisted her hands in her robe. "I tried not to be. But..."

It started to click, and he cursed himself for not thinking of it sooner. She had startled him, even frightened him when she'd murdered the disgusting alien. Not for his sake, but for the way she'd looked when she'd done it, so cold, so impassive- he'd thought he'd lost her. But then she'd gone on like it had never happened. Colder, perhaps, more stoic, but still his Exile. So he'd shrugged it aside, in his easy manner, and let it go.

Apparently, she hadn't, and he should have known she wouldn't.

"You want me to tell you it's ok?" He asked, gently, but not kindly. "You want me to tell you that you're not evil, that you didn't touch the dark side? I don't like lies. You killed the guy- cold and simple. Did you use the dark side? Probably. Congradulations, you're a murderer like me."

She winced, shying away from him in a manner that made him wonder who she was, now. Certainly not the stalwart, determined woman he'd decided to follow to the ends of the universe. He needed that woman back- they all did. He needed her out of this state of confusion, this whirlwind of doubt and vulnerability she'd trapped herself in. He took her by her shoulders and shook her.

"Listen to me!" He hissed. "So you found out the world isn't black and white like the Jedi taught you- you found out that when you mix and match different sets of rules, the consequences get gnarly and tangled. Deal with it. You touched the darkside; that does not make you sith. You killed someone in cold blood. Guess what? I guarantee he deserved it."

"Not my place," she retorted. Something in his diatribe had gotten through to her, and now she was staring up at him with a hint of her old fire in her gaze. "Who am I to decide who lives and who dies? That's not my call."

"Isn't it?" He asked. "Someone has to. Who, if not you legendarily wise and fair Jedi?"

"But I wasn't fair with him," she spat. "I simply wanted him dead. There was no justice in what I did."

"Maybe no justice was considered, but I'm willing to bet the families of people he'd probably killed and maybe tortured would find worlds of justice in what you meted out."

She hand no response to that. She stared angrily out into the sunshine of the squalid quarter, another droid buzzing merrily past the alley entrance.

"It doesn't make it right," she said after a moment, voice quiet but intense.

"No, it doesn't," he said. His hands were still on her shoulders. Rather than bruising and confining, now, they were gentle, simply resting there. He lifted one hand to move her face back to look at him- or at least in his general direction. She still wouldn't meet his gaze.

"If you can't look me in the eye, a fellow murderer, then who can you look at?" He said, sardonically. She stiffened, glowering up at him, and he couldn't help but smile. Distorted, tainted, darkened and somewhat twisted, that heat burned him, that heat that lit her eyes from within and made her look like a living tool of the universe.

"You were raised from childhood in a world of lines, rules, boundaries, then had it all stripped away from you. You cocooned yourself for years in places where you could maintain those things yourself." He held her gaze, making sure his words sank home. "And then, now, there is nothing but you, and the real universe. No rules, no restrictions, no guidelines. No one, not even the Jedi, ever wrote a handbook on how to save the universe and keep your soul clean. Frankly, I don't think its possible to do both. But, exile-" he turned her face back to him, again, when she swallowed visibly and tried to look away. "-a dirty soul doesn't mean you can't keep going, can't keep fighting the good fight."

"No," she agreed wearily. "It just means that when I finish that fight, I don't get to stand in sunshine with all the good boys and girls." She shrugged off his hands, and turned towards the alley entrance. Her eyes were dark, her expression serious. But that coldness was gone, replaced with her old fire. Looking at her, Atton realized something.

"Serving with Revan...you never actually killed anyone, did you?"

Her back was to him, now. He saw her turn her head, saw the just the barest edges of her profile through loosened locks of wine-red hair.

"No," she said. "I didn't. I couldn't." She hesitated. "I thought...being the cause of death, it was bad enough. But, delivering it first hand..." She visibly suppressed a shiver. He came up behind her. He moved to put his hands on her shoulders again, and instead found himself wrapping his arms around her from behind, folding her into his chest. She reached up, hands gripping his forearms as they closed over her torso. She turned her head into his shoulder.

"Then that alone, exile, is enough to tell me you're still far, far away from the darkside." He smiled an ironic smile into her hair. "And I should know." She gave a humorless laugh, and tightened her grip on his arms.

"Then that's good enough for now," she said.

It was a long time before she moved out of his embrace. And when she did, she didn't look at him even once, not until they were back on the ship with the others, and had their hands and minds full of rescuing a Queen.

The End.

Not sure if I like this one. I liked the idea, of evaluating a primarily light-side exile's reaction to a sole dark-side choice. No romance, obviously, although I did manage to work in a few hints. Darker and more bitter than most of my other pieces, but oh well. Let me know what you think.

Oh, and ideas are welcome. I'm starting to run out of strictly game-circumstance related scenarios.

-Amber


End file.
